Wednesday, April 20, 2016

GUHSD is starting a three to four-year process to develop Open Educational Resource (OER) Curriculum Collections to replace and supplement our traditional textbook model in some subjects. We are joining a national movement called #GoOpen that was kicked off at a White House event in November. GUHSD representatives attended that event and a follow-up event in March near San Francisco where districts across the nation shared best practices and strategies for successful implementation of OER materials.

This comes at a perfect time for our district. FutureForward provides us the opportunity to rethink how curriculum is delivered in a world where digital content dominates our lives. This is an exciting and daunting idea. We need to be deliberate and focused in our continued efforts to ensure our students get equal access to quality resources and instruction.

The idea was first presented to many teachers and administrators in December. Between December and March, GEA and the district established some key guidelines to ensure that OER development and integration of the finished products were reasonable and fair to teachers while being systematic and scalable. During that process, we know there was a lot of discussion at sites and subject area councils. We are now able to share specific information, including the curation process, roles, and some examples. All of this information is now available at the GUHSDtech website: http://tech.guhsd.net/oer